Cover your ears to mute the sound of Christmas celebration

An eccentric San Francisco dandy, from the collection of Wreden cards.

Show and tell:

•An exhibition of holiday cards printed over 64 years by an array of well-known fine printers, and sent by William P. Wreden, Family and Friends is at the Book Club of California until Jan. 18. In a note about the exhibition, curator Bo Wreden also sent along an editorial from the Daily Morning Chronicle of Dec. 25, 1868, complaining about toot-horns (whatever they are).

“These infernal toot-horns are certain inventions of the devil, to rob Christmas of its pleasure and bring people to look upon its coming with horror. ... They are the most infamous, diabolical, horrible, discordant, deafening, damnable machines that the ingenuity of man ever invented. ... They cater to the meanest tastes of mean boys, and we grieve to see how mean our San Francisco boys can be.”

This accursed instrument, it seems, has since disappeared from widespread use, replaced perhaps by the vuvuzela or thundersticks. There may or may not be hope for the future.

•“We demonstrate that our historical image dataset may be used together with weakly-supervised data-driven techniques to perform scalable historical analysis of large image corpora with minimal human effort.” That’s a statement from the abstract of “A Century of Portraits, A Visual History Record of American High School Yearbooks,” in which researchers — led by a team from UC Berkeley — studied 37,921 high school yearbook portraits and found, for example, that modern graduates smile more than those in 1900.

•In “Mend Piece,” a participatory work by Yoko Ono at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Galerie Lelong in New York, visitors sit at long tables and use scissors, tape and rubber cement to put together broken pieces of crockery. The text: “Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time.”

•Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, his wife, were spotted on a movie date on Thursday night, Dec. 17: They were at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas for the first showing of the new “Star Wars.”

•Another local tribute responding to the shootings in France: A customer reports that Hopkins Launderette in Berkeley, which is owned by the Fukawa family, has a “largish glass vase on the counter, filled with tiny exquisite red, white and blue origami cranes, carefully arranged in three vertical sections,” in homage to the French flag. It sits there, without a sign, “in sweet silent tribute,” she says.

Debonair bon vivant Matthew Kelly, who died a week or so ago, was a much-admired and much-quoted member of the pack o’ pals of Herb Caen —Wilkes Bashford, Willie Brown, Sandy Walker, Harry de Wildt: the Le Central lunch gang.

His wife was the stylish Diane Chapman, to whom, wrote Caen upon their engagement, Kelly had given a 7-carat ring. This was in keeping with the image he cultivated, that of an archetypal man-about-town who knew how to have a good time while living the good life. Every one of his mentions in Herb Caen’s columns portrayed him as witty; one can’t imagine Matthew Kelly ever having attended a boring party, or appearing in public without a silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. Every drink he had was Champagne, every snack was caviar, every ride was in his Jaguar.

When Caen and Art Hoppe and the other members of the haute literary set that met once a month at a round table at Moose’s mentioned Kelly, they’d joke about how he’d infiltrated their group. Kelly, who was said to have made his money in insuring airplanes, was not at all a published author.

It didn’t matter. His cachet trumped any lack of literary credentials, and his “membership” in the group was the opposite of the Marxist (Groucho, that is) principle about not wanting to be in any club that would want him. Everyone in this set — Caen, Hoppe, people whose professional skills had built their legacies — wanted to be in the same club as Matthew Kelly.

And isn’t it a wonderful time of year? “With all the company, cooking and Christmas lights this time of year,” says Homeselfe, “energy use skyrockets and so do utility bills.” (Oh, just put another blanket on the bed and climb under the covers.)

Today’s drought tip, created for the lactose-tolerant, is from John McMurtrie, who says if it was good enough for Cleopatra, shouldn’t more of us bathe in milk?

Leah Garchik washed up on the shores of Fifth and Mission in 1972, began her duties as a part-time temporary steno clerk, and has done everything around The Chronicle including washing the dishes (her coffee cup). Over the years, she has served as writer, reviewer, editor and columnist. She is the author of two books, “San Francisco: Its Sights and Secrets” and “Real Life Romance."

She is an avid knitter, a terrible accordion player, a sporadic tweeter and a pretty good speller.